The Moon is on Fire

(A Titanic Fanfiction)

Disclaimer: Jim Cameron owns these gorgeous characters and everything to do with the 1997 film Titanic; this story is meant for entertainment purposes only!

Chapter Four: Bird on a Beam

Being poor, or an unceremonious stripping of all things, these are not entirely foreign to my family. They're in the ancestral blood, in whatever little fragments and blobs and bits fill our veins, passed down from those who bled before. Whether or not my mother chooses to acknowledge it, it lurks, like a child with a dirty face peeking from behind her toile curtains. The DeWitts, my DeWitts, came over on a ship from the Netherlands in 1831 with empty pockets and empty stomachs, pushed and pushed by crop failures until my great-grandmother worried that the new baby in her womb (which was Ruth's mother) might waste away inside her. Just turn to dust. And so they immigrated to Michigan, a family of five, of almost six, with little more than one broken suitcase and a few coins. They felled trees. Got filthy. Made cornbread with hot water. Bathed in lakes. But within five years my great-grandfather held considerable interest in a lumber mill.

And the rest is history, albeit a history that Ruth would prefer to forget, or rather to re-write, depending on the day, depending on the locale. Her familial lies are grand when she's had champagne, grander still when she's around women whose status might obscure her own. To the Countess, here on Titanic, they were so far fetched as to stretch to the stars. My father actually told me most of the DeWitt lore, for she won't utter the real words. It should come as no surprise that my parents' marriage was largely a sherry-soaked business arrangement between DeWitt and Bukater elders; but he felt I deserved all the information I could get, that I deserved the truth.

All this to say that being poor scares me, of course it does, but not in an existential way that I can't fathom. I can fathom it. Life is cyclical. When my father died I knew my life wouldn't be the same anymore, that I wouldn't have the freedom that I was used to, and so I think I processed the radical change right away. Being with Jack takes the sadness away and replaces it with hope, however, with a joy so fitful that I can barely stand still, and so I will gladly take the change. Change in every fiber of my being, what I am, what I have. More importantly, what I will no longer have. I could be stripped of everything and stand by him, I know it, for together we exude that freedom that I thought I'd buried too deep. The freedom that stories used to offer me but now has come to glorious life.

The logistics, though, are not so easy as espousing all this on paper.

We have to eat, and we have to lay down our heads. (At just the suggestion in my own mind of sleeping next to him somewhere, in a bed, a meadow, anything, my insides liquefy.) We have to have some sort of plan. At least a vague one. I could see us in Santa Monica in the sunshine but there would have to be so much else, wouldn't there? The smaller moments that move you toward the epic ones.

He's never had a plan before, he jokes with that crooked grin, but he's also never traveled with a woman before.

That he calls me a woman.

"We'll have to lie, you know, about what we are to one another, if we want to move freely from place to place," I sighed and looked out, right through the railing to a calm mid-morning ocean, "God, I'm sure you know this, Jack, but the social mores…" I licked my lips, for they were caked with salt now, and dry. We were huddled right near the stern, backs propped up against huge white boxes, some type of storage vessels. "They leave a bit to be desired if I want to be...progressive." More blushing, my whole body blushing under my dress. "Perhaps I could say I was your sister."

He took a long drag from a cigarette and in the silence it left I felt my head aching. A slow vibration, along my forehead, seemingly in time with the way you could feel the steel move down here, even on relatively tranquil seas. (The ship had been abuzz for the past hour because of three mammoth icebergs spotted just to the North; I shuddered thinking of the one we'd seen the night before, how Jack and I might be among only a few people who understood how trauma had grazed us, teased us.)

"My sister! Shit, Rose." He laughed but it sounded like a grunt, and smoke filled his nose, my nose. "It's so different," he shook his head and squinted out across the gray water as well, looking for something, "for men and women, I mean, Rose. I've been able to move freely wherever I go. As long as I'm okay with being called...what word did Cal choose, 'filth'? Scoundrel? Vagabond? I've heard them all, anyway." But he chuckled again and in just one motion threw the cigarette out into the abyss and slid his left arm around my waist; tiny hummingbird wings lit up along the inside edge of my abdomen. At the comfort of it. At the ease of it now, at how we felt together.

It was astonishing.

"This is astonishing." I meant to keep the thought inside. But it came out upon my lips like a tiny dancer and he knew instinctively all of what I meant, of course he did. Eyes sparkling and he brought his mouth down to mine fast, hot, no space between our breaths. Each set of lips holding the other like hands might grasp, very little movement but incalculable force.

He spoke, then, almost into my mouth.

"We'll do whatever we have to, to stay together." Then just a whisper against the skin of my damp cheek, such an intimacy. "We'll be safe, I promise, Rose."

"We'll work, we'll find work." I nodded to him, to myself, I don't know. Would the wind even believe me? I've never worked a day in my life. Not unless you count reading to wounded men at a Philadelphia charity hospital that my grandfather funded (a beautiful experience, but I'd hardly count going there one hour a week with Trudy at my side real work). Yet I meant what I'd said to Jack several days before. My hands were made for work, for something frenetic. I can feel it. I'm sturdy, I'm tireless when I need to be; school was the only venue I'd been allowed to showcase these attributes in at all, and even that Ruth had ripped out from underneath me.

"No more caviar." His whispers were delicious. Tiny kisses like Morse code up my cheekbone, forehead, back down the hairline near my ear. Humor in every crevice. It was glorious.

The rings would buy us time. I wasn't sure how much, but enough to get our bearings. Jack wondered if selling them would feel like a betrayal to my father, if it would feel like losing a part of him. So I told him about my father, hunched there. We sat for an hour talking about him and I have never felt more simultaneously stuck in time but ready to propel forward. Richard (my lovely father) adored adventure. He wished he'd had more of it. And he would have loathed Cal. Did loathe Cal, in fact. Snickering toward the Hockley table at a hospital fundraiser once, something about the way both father and son slicked their hair back identically, but also the way my dad's face held mostly humor but flirted with disdain and some amount of fear of those men. He would have never let Cal's hands near me. As I spoke those words I took one of Jack's and put it on my right thigh, pressed it in.

"Put your hands on me, Jack."

I expected, then, my heartbeat to be absolute thunder but it remained low, almost imperceptible. The serenity was not silent, not for long, though, as every little sound from both of us echoed in the tiny space. The clicking of our mouths. Our clothes, sweaty, I could hear the folds of them. Off, off, off, I wanted them off. The muffled moan from his throat when his hand moved from my breast briefly down to my waist, then unto my right inner thigh as I shifted, nothing less than demanded it from him. The way my whole being sighed into him. Opened for him like a flower.

How steady the hands that reached for the buttons of his shirt. These hands of mine that have been, for the most part, absolute innocents. They've fumbled on Cal's arms, his cheeks, his back, always with the intention of escape, of giving enough to satiate in those small doses. But they've never roamed like this, wanted like this. Jack shivered when I touched his bare chest. I realized in that instant what I could do, with these hands, all the ways I could show him. Show him absolutely everything about how he made me feel.

"Rose." He swallowed hard, looked down at me. "Rose, are you sure?"

"So you think he would have approved, in some strange way then?" The wind picked up, blew the blond locks over his forehead. Good God, this man is so exquisite. "Do you really think so, even though it's…" He looked down. One fissure, then, in his confidence; it is unbelievable to me how much he has, given what he's lived through in just twenty years. His world literally burned around him when he was still such a child; his family, his memories, lost inside flames that he recalls looked the color of ripe tangerines. "Even though I'm a lowly pauper, as one might say?"

"I think he would have appreciated the allegory." I was so tired, tired down to my bones, but all I could think about was touching Jack in some new way. I took a forefinger to his chin and smiled. "Isn't that a fairy tale, the princess and the pauper?"

"It's the Princess and the Pea, Rose," he laughed and the doubt was sent away again, banished out into the ether where it belonged. "And I'm pretty sure in that story it was the woman in question." Kissed my finger. "Was she real, was she true?"

Was she?

"Was she?"

I held my breath.

He seemed to breathe it out of his own mouth. "She sure was."

When I arrived back to the suite an hour later I was, as planned, slightly shaking and on my own. My arms, my hands, felt immediately empty away from Jack. We were nervous, of course, each having guessed at what quiet but effective act of malice Cal might have concocted in my absence. Jack seethed at the thought of my being alone with any of them now. Nothing felt safe, but ultimately we knew that if Jack was caught in the First Class corridors again, our story, on this ship at least, would be over; for even if he could see through Cal's facade, Mr. King (the Master at Arms) would not be able to turn away from three summons. Jack would spend the rest of the journey in that tiny cell.

I had to get in, get out, and get to Molly. I tried the door, the one from the hallway to my bedroom, but it was locked, unshockingly.

All I wanted was Jack's sketchbook, if it had survived the night, and to manage some form of a goodbye to my mother. Inside some moments I didn't think she deserved it at all, that perhaps my disappearing into smoke and mirrors, just utterly gone, would teach her the lessons she'd needed her entire life. But then I'd remember sitting with her in our garden on summer nights when I was five or six and the lightning bugs landed in my tiny palm. She'd gasp, pretend it was the first time she'd ever seen them. Or the day I got my monthly cycle for the first time, home from school for Christmas holiday, and she'd sat next to me while I laid in the bathtub, explaining everything. There was a redemption narrative in her but I didn't know how to unlock it. Parts of her soul were sweetness but the ways that she remained married to Main Line life, to the spoils of her privilege, I didn't know how to break through any of it. She'd sold me to Cal, she had, and maybe there was truly no returning from such a shore. Maybe our relationship just drowned here, became a ghost.

"Grief fades, as love fades, and lust fades, it all fades, Rose."

That's what she'd said to me, said to the back of me, the night before as I'd walked numbly to my room.

"What matters is being taken care of, that's what I was trying to do for you."

I knocked recklessly and she answered, face red and flustered as if she'd been laying in wait, and in anger. Trudy sat in a corner in a small chair, disheveled and disbelieving and obviously feeling useless in the face of such a shake up. Trudy, who exudes kindness. Trudy, who has bought into this system in which she remains on the lower rungs, and only because she feels she has no other choice; I felt like shouting at her, shouting into her: "run, run, you can run too!" But I stayed silent, instead, stared Ruth down as I walked into the sitting room and crossed my arms at my chest. I know she hates this motion; it's unladylike (too masculine!), it's crass.

"The engagement is off, it's over," she was dressed and her hair pinned but she wore no powder, no rouge, no lipstain, a muted sight unknown to me for years and years, "Rose you've killed it all, you've ruined us." Tears ringing her pale eyelids but I had no pity. Not yet. Maybe another day, maybe in another life. For the time being all I could process was indignation, fury, that she'd dared to tell me that my own engagement was over! It had been over since the moment I stepped foot on this damned ship, even if I'd not quite had the courage to understand just yet. If Jack hadn't found me on the stern I might have exited all of this in a very different way. I wished Ruth knew it. Knew that I'd almost left this world on my own accord rather than walk down the thorny aisle she'd laid for me.

"Mother, it's been over, long over. I never would have married him, not after-"

"Not after you gave yourself away to that young fool, oh trust me, I see." I'd never heard her voice raise that way, to such a decibel, never known her to cut me off in such a clip. Her words, scissors. Her expression, a dull knife.

"You mean the gutter rat?" Cal's voice (treacly, dripping a sugar that rotted the instant it hit the air) entered the room fast, his body faster. He'd caught me off guard, which he's excellent at, wearing a morning jacket the color of mud, white collar underneath undone, his whole disposition more casual than I'd ever seen before. It was as if this experience had peeled back the physical layers of us all. We were bare. The charade of our usual markings, all the clothes and the lotions and the potions, what use were they in the face of a reckoning? Cal circled and then landed in front of me and I flinched. I hate that I flinched. Ruth went silent. "I heard Mr. King let him go. Lucky boy," and he moved closer, whiskey on his breath even though it was not even eleven in the morning, "so I'm wondering, Rose, how is it?"

A pause. Seventeen beats of my heart. Violence in his eyes and I was ready to turn and run, if I had to. "How is what, Cal?" I'm shocked my voice worked.

"How is it being his whore, one whole day in?" A chuckle, and that snide way that his lips curl. I closed my eyes briefly and I imagined another universe where it happened, where I married him and I went to bed with him and I bore raven-haired children who spit at waiters and snickered and despised me because I became a walking corpse. I have no idea what future Jack and I can have, but I knew in that moment, blood boiling at Cal's words, that anything on the road ahead (our road, a road for Jack and I) was infinitely more satisfying, infinitely softer.

What was the line? Jack sang it in my ear not twenty minutes before. To describe my strength.

"Balance yourself like a bird on a beam,

In the air she goes, there she goes!"

And so I finally looked Cal in the eyes, then, after months of casting them downward.

"I'd rather be his whore than your wife."

And I have never meant a set of words more. And I have never seen a man recoil the way Cal did. The sadness that flickered in his eyes after the anger, I'm not daft, I saw it. Perhaps in some strange way he'd convinced himself that his control of me was love. That what I saw as malice was ingrained in him from his father and his father's father. But I could not bear the emotional weight of that. I wouldn't.

Within seconds any vulnerability was gone, though. His hand hovered and I thought for an instant that he would strike me. I felt my mother's body start. Startle.

"Take nothing, you can take nothing," and he turned to Trudy to enforce such a thing, which made no sense, what with the limp way her body sat in that chair, horror personified.

"Where are Jack's drawings, Cal, where are they?" I didn't back down, I wouldn't. I'd let Jack down the night before, and if I'm being completely honest with myself I'd also used him, used his sketch of me, exploited it inside this back and forth with Cal, this play we'd had to act out. But no more.

Cal replied with laughter. The laughter of maniacs, quiet, but consistent and chilling.

"Actually, I take it back Rose, go into the room, take a look."

Author's Note: Thank you, as always! This is such NEW territory for me. I write slow burns, typically, arggggg! This story has become a whole new challenge for me as a writer, in a great way, and I'm having fun just seeing where it takes me. If there's anything you'd like to see explored while they're still on the ship, whether from a historical perspective or just something sweet (or sexy, yikes) with Jack and Rose, let me know. Seriously guys, I'm winging this, it's a blast, and I'm open to input.

Cheers-

RGD